Posthuman Capital: Symbiotic Material Economies for the 21st Century

This paper will reframe the relationships that architects and designers have with the sources of their material wealth through a posthumanist development of social capital and human capital theory. Human capital theory posits a modern subject that is highly individualized and operates only in its own entrepreneurial self-interest; the posthuman subject, in contrast, is an interrelated being that is constantly reinvented through its relationships with others. If architects and designers want to build in ways that are more environmentally sound, they have to abandon the modernist subjectivities that allowed them to separate themselves from the sources of their material wealth. They have to acknowledge that as architects, they are constituted by the trees, metal ores, and stone that they design with. To work in ways that benefit themselves and the material assemblages which support their livelihoods, they have to take responsibility for how those materials come into their stewardship. A theory of posthuman capital would provide the foundation for such an epistemic shift, and would introduce a new means of establishing mutually beneficial relationships with the material world. I will contextualize this philosophical argument with practical case studies from research in indigenous epistemologies, and look to feminist ethics of care to provide a particular approach to non-human subjects in line with posthuman capital theory.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.InterMaterialEco.23.42

Volume Editors
Caryn Brause & Chris Flint Chatto